Emperor Wu: A Father's Menace, a Son's Fear, a Crown Prince Hanged, and a Luntai Edict of Self-Reproach Too Late —Memories of Hanshu Figures, No. 9

This is a source-checked, AI-assisted contemporary bilingual narrative by Clio Walker, based on ancient texts and research materials actually available to the editor. It is neither Emperor Wu’s testimony nor Ban Gu’s original prose. Actions in the histories, later judgments, and present-day interpretation are distinguished.

Emperor Wu of Han issued countless edicts in his lifetime. Most of them sent men to war, to the frontiers, to their deaths.

Only one begins almost like a confession: "In times past, We were not clear-sighted."

When he wrote those words, his crown prince had been dead for two years, his body cut down in a poor man's thatched hut in Hu County.

I. The Paulownia Figures

Chang'an, 91 BCE.

Jiang Chong, who was in charge of investigating the witchcraft cases, told the emperor that there was an aura of sorcery in the palace. He led his men in a search that reached deep into the palace; they dismantled even the imperial throne and dug up the floor.

At last they dug into the crown prince's palace and unearthed figures carved from paulownia wood.

The emperor was ill at the time and had gone to the Ganquan Palace to escape the summer heat. In Chang'an only the empress and the crown prince, Liu Ju, remained.

The wooden figures were taken as proof of a curse. But digging something up and proving who buried it are two different things.

The crown prince asked his junior tutor, Shi De. Afraid that he too would be put to death as the prince's teacher, Shi De said something fateful: the former chancellor and his son, two princesses, and members of the Wei family have all died in cases like this. Now the sorcerers and envoys have dug up "evidence," and no one can tell whether the sorcerers planted it themselves or whether it is real. The crown prince has no way to clear himself.

He went on: the emperor lies ill at Ganquan; the empress and the household officials have sent to ask after his health and received no reply at all. "Whether the emperor is alive or dead cannot be known," and yet the treacherous ministers are already this brazen. "Has the crown prince forgotten what happened to Fusu of Qin?"

Fusu was the Qin crown prince who received a forged edict and killed himself.

The crown prince, desperate, took Shi De's advice.

II. A Son Takes Up His Father's Troops

In the seventh month of the second year of Zhenghe, the crown prince sent retainers posing as imperial envoys to arrest Jiang Chong.

Han Yue, Marquis of Andao, who was assisting the investigation, suspected the envoys were false and refused to accept the order; the retainers struck him down on the spot. The imperial secretary Zhang Gan escaped, wounded, back to Ganquan.

The crown prince then sent men bearing tallies into the Weiyang Palace by night to inform the empress, requisition carriages and horses, open the arsenal, and call out the palace guard. He announced to the officials: Jiang Chong has rebelled.

Jiang Chong was beheaded. The crown prince organized his retainers into units, and they fought the army of the chancellor, Liu Qumao, inside the city of Chang'an.

Liu Ju had wanted to use the emperor's authority to subdue Jiang Chong, but by seizing that authority on his own he fell into a deeper pit. The story that spread through Chang'an was that the crown prince had rebelled. Many refused to follow him because of it.

A matter that a father and son ought to have settled face to face became a battle in the capital.

The Annals of Emperor Wu record that tens of thousands died in that fighting. The empress killed herself. The crown prince was defeated and fled Chang'an.

III. The Man Who Sold Sandals

Liu Ju fled to Hu County and hid with a family in Quanjiu village.

The Book of Han describes that household in a single sentence: "The master of the house was poor, and often sold sandals to provide for the crown prince."

A few days earlier he had been commanding the palace guard and the arsenal. Now what kept him alive was the money a poor man earned selling straw sandals, pair by pair.

The crown prince heard that an old acquaintance of his in Hu County was wealthy, and sent someone to find him. That gave away where he was.

Officials closed in. Knowing he could not escape, the crown prince went inside, shut the door, and hanged himself. Someone kicked the door open; someone rushed in and cut him down. The sandal-seller was killed in the fighting, and two imperial grandsons who had come with the prince died as well.

Emperor Wu's response was not, at first, the remorse later generations know. Though grieved, he still made marquises of the men who had distinguished themselves in capturing the crown prince. The Book of Han sets the grief and the rewards side by side, and does not smooth out the contradiction for the reader.

IV. The Palace of Longing for a Son

In fact, just after the crown prince fled, one of the Three Elders of Huguan had sent up a memorial. The prince, it said, could not go forward to see his father, and when he drew back he was hemmed in by treacherous ministers. He had taken up his father's troops to save himself. The memorial asked the emperor to call off the pursuit.

It placed responsibility back before the emperor: when father and son suspect each other, perhaps the father has not looked closely enough.

The biography says Emperor Wu read it and was moved. But being moved did not reach the door in Hu County before it was kicked open.

Later, many accusations in the witchcraft cases came to look unreliable. Tian Qianqiu, too, pleaded the crown prince's innocence, and Emperor Wu promoted him to chancellor. Jiang Chong's clan was exterminated. The eunuch Su Wen was burned alive on the Heng Bridge. The man who had raised a blade against the crown prince in Quanjiu was first made governor of Beidi, and later his clan too was wiped out.

The emperor's verdict was reversed, and the method was still killing.

Emperor Wu pitied the crown prince's innocence. He built a Palace of Longing for a Son and, in Hu County, a "Terrace of Gazing in Longing for His Return." The Book of Han says: "The whole realm heard of it and grieved."

However high the terrace, however far it looked, the crown prince did not come back.

V. A Horse

In 90 BCE, the year after the crown prince's death, Li Guangli, the Ershi General, attacked the Xiongnu, was defeated, and surrendered.

Two years later, Sang Hongyang and others memorialized asking to establish military farms at Luntai in the Western Regions. Emperor Wu rejected the proposal and wrote the edict later called the "Luntai Edict of Self-Reproach."

To explain why he rejected it, we must start with a horse.

Earlier, a frontier officer named Hong had reported that the Xiongnu had tied a horse's front and hind legs together, left it below the city wall, and shouted to the Han: "Men of Qin, I give you a horse."

What did it mean? Emperor Wu showed the report to the chancellor, the imperial secretary, officials of two-thousand-bushel rank, the grandees, the literary men among the court gentlemen, and even the commandants of the frontier commanderies. All said: "The barbarians have bound their own horse; nothing could be more inauspicious!" Some said instead that it was a deliberate show of strength: "Those who lack make a show of having more than enough."

After human opinion came divination. The Book of Changes yielded the hexagram Daguo, "Great Excess," read as meaning the Xiongnu were exhausted and would be defeated. The diviners and the grand astrologer watched the stars and the vapors; the grand augur used tortoise shell and milfoil. All said it was auspicious: the Xiongnu would surely be broken, and the moment must not be lost. They also said: "Sending generals north, at Mount Fu we will surely win." Of all the generals divined for, Li Guangli came out most auspicious.

So Emperor Wu himself sent Li Guangli out, with only one warning: on no account go in too deep.

The edict continues: "Now the plans and the omens have all proved false."

After the battle, the Han army captured a Xiongnu scout. He said that when the Xiongnu heard the Han army was coming, they had their shamans bury sheep and oxen on the roads and at the water sources the Han army would pass, to curse it. Binding the horse was a spell to curse the army.

That is a captive's account, and we have no Xiongnu record of their own to check it against. But in his edict Emperor Wu had already admitted it: the plans and omens of that time had all been wrong.

The weight of this passage is that the man who made the decision put himself back inside it. He did not merely count his general's mistakes, nor did he erase the auspicious signs on which the diviners had once spoken with one voice.

Many opinions, all of them saying "auspicious," do not mean there is victory ahead.

VI. Luntai

Sang Hongyang's proposal was not for another war. It was about water, land, and grain. East of Luntai there was irrigable land. Soldiers could be sent to farm it, a colonel appointed, canals dug, and the five grains planted. Once grain had been stored, sturdy commoners with families could be recruited to move there, and the line of watch posts extended westward.

On paper, each link answered a practical problem.

Emperor Wu would not approve it.

First he raised another proposal. The officials had once asked to add thirty cash to each commoner's tax to help pay for the frontier. This, he said, "heavily burdens the old, the weak, the orphaned, and the alone."

Then he dug out an old account.

Some years earlier, when the Han army attacked Jushi, several small states of the Western Regions had supplied livestock and grain to support it and sent tens of thousands of troops to help besiege the city, and the King of Jushi surrendered. But once the fighting was over, the allied troops dispersed, and the states had no strength left to feed the Han army on the road.

The Han army had taken the city and captured a great deal of grain, but what the soldiers could carry was not enough for the journey back. "The strong ate up all the livestock; of the weak, several thousand died on the road."

The strong ate the animals; the weak died along the way, by the thousands. Emperor Wu sent donkeys and camels from Jiuquan loaded with grain out through the Jade Gate to meet them. Even the group that set out from Zhangye, not so far away, lost many stragglers.

That was a war they had won. The edict still recorded the thousands who never came home.

Luntai was more than a thousand li farther than Jushi.

"Recently the Ershi General was defeated, and his soldiers died, were captured, or were scattered. The grief of it is always in Our heart. Now there is a request to farm distant Luntai and build watchtowers. This would trouble and exhaust the realm, and is no way to care for the people. We cannot bear to hear of it now."

VII. What Was Never Reported

There is another passage in the edict that reads with special sharpness.

Emperor Wu said: the frontier is now poorly governed. People slip out beyond the passes without being stopped. Frontier officials send soldiers out hunting and profit from the hides and meat; the soldiers suffer, and the beacon fires are neglected. When things go wrong, the news does not reach the court. Only when Xiongnu deserters come over, or captives are taken alive, does the court learn of it.

Earlier, when it came to reading the meaning of a horse, the opinions of every official and every diviner had been gathered in good order. The things that truly affected the frontier defenses never made it into the reports at all.

The edict ends very plainly: "The task today is to forbid harshness and cruelty, stop unauthorized levies, devote effort to agriculture, restore the horse-rearing exemption ordinance to make up shortfalls, and not let military preparedness lapse. That is all."

It rejected this one plan for distant military farms and new taxes. It did not announce an end to frontier defense.

VIII. The Marquis Who Enriches the People

After the edict, the Book of Han adds a line: "From then on no more armies were sent out. And the chancellor Che Qianqiu was enfeoffed as Marquis Who Enriches the People, to make clear the policy of rest and the wish to enrich and nourish the people."

Che Qianqiu was the same Tian Qianqiu who had pleaded the crown prince's innocence.

The Treatise on Food and Money further links Emperor Wu's late remorse with the encouragement of farming, and goes on to describe how Zhao Guo spread the "alternating field" method: seeds were sown in the furrows, and at each weeding the soil from the ridges was gradually banked up around the roots of the seedlings; the next year ridges and furrows swapped places. He also taught methods for farm tools and for tending seedlings, and households with no ox learned to pull the plow together, several people at once.

This is far more concrete than saying "the emperor finally came to his senses." To make the fields yield more grain, someone had to try the planting, someone had to teach it, someone had to make the tools, and someone had to find a solution for households without oxen.

But we cannot conclude from this that every heavy institution of Emperor Wu's reign was dismantled, much less draw for him a path of the heart from cruelty to mercy.

IX. Two Endings

At the end of the Annals of Emperor Wu, Ban Gu writes his appraisal. He first lists in one breath Emperor Wu's achievements in promoting worthy men, founding schools, setting rites, and reforming the calendar, and closes with one sentence: if this emperor of great talent and vision had also kept the reverence and frugality of Emperors Wen and Jing to help the people, how fine that would have been.

Inside the praise lies an "if" that never came true.

A thousand years later, Sima Guang placed Emperor Wu beside the First Emperor of Qin. Going through the palaces, the levies, the wars, and the quest for immortality, he said Emperor Wu was not very different from the First Emperor; the reason Han did not go the way of Qin was that Emperor Wu could listen to loyal advice, corrected his course in old age, and entrusted his young heir to the right men.

With that ending, Emperor Wu's life acquired a clear turning point, and a lesson that could be told to later rulers.

Scholars today still debate how sharp that line really is. Was the Luntai Edict a limited military adjustment, or a sweeping political turn? How did a Song-dynasty historian's choice of sources shape the Emperor Wu we see? These debates are not settled.

X. Epilogue

In memory, Emperor Wu can be the mighty ruler who expanded the frontiers, or the sovereign who made his people and his own family pay a crushing price.

Neither image can bring the crown prince back to Chang'an.

"In times past, We were not clear-sighted." The words came too late, and they were written too precisely.

Too late, because the door in Quanjiu had long since been kicked open. Too precisely, because he had finally seen it: when a whole room says "auspicious," the people most worth asking are the ones who never made it into the reports, and the ones who never came back.

———

Sources and editorial notes

1. Core primary texts: Book of Han, chapter 6, Annals of Emperor Wu (second year of Zhenghe to second year of Houyuan, and the appraisal); chapter 63, Biographies of the Five Sons of Emperor Wu (Crown Prince Li); chapter 66, Biographies of Gongsun, Liu, Tian, Wang, Yang, Cai, Chen, and Zheng (Tian Qianqiu); chapter 96, part 2, Treatise on the Western Regions (the Luntai memorial and edict); chapter 24, part 1, Treatise on Food and Money (Zhao Guo's alternating fields). A public-domain electronic transcription with Yan Shigu's commentary is used; the text reads the commentary separately from Ban Gu's narrative and quotes no modern translation. Links: https://ancient-china-books.github.io/hanshu/OEBPS/Text/006.htm https://ancient-china-books.github.io/hanshu/OEBPS/Text/063.htm https://ancient-china-books.github.io/hanshu/OEBPS/Text/066.htm https://ancient-china-books.github.io/hanshu/OEBPS/Text/096b.htm https://ancient-china-books.github.io/hanshu/OEBPS/Text/024a.htm

2. Later assessment: Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, chapter 22, fourth year of Zhenghe and second year of Houyuan, including Sima Guang's comment, used for Song-period reception and chronological comparison, not presented as an independent Western Han witness. Following that chronology, the Luntai Edict is dated to 89 BCE; the witchcraft disaster to 91 BCE, Li Guangli's defeat and surrender to 90 BCE, and Emperor Wu's death to 87 BCE. Ancient calendar dates are not forced into modern months and days. Link: https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/資治通鑑/卷022

3. Modern debate: obtained were the table of contents and statement of purpose of Xin Deyong's Making Emperor Wu of Han, published by the Center for Ancient Chinese History at Peking University, and the official journal abstract of Li Hao's "Doubts about the Thesis That Sima Guang Reconstructed Emperor Wu's Late Political Orientation: A Discussion with Xin Deyong" (article no. 1672-3104(2015)06-0216-07). These are cited only to show that a debate exists, without claiming to have read the full arguments or using abstracts to decide it. Links: https://zggds.pku.edu.cn/xzxz/28zggdsyjzx57580.htm https://zndxsk.csu.edu.cn/info/1239/5408.htm

4. Geographic boundaries: Han Chang'an corresponds to the Han city site area northwest of present-day Xi'an; the Weiyang and Changle palaces belong to that Han capital and should not be mapped directly onto Tang Chang'an or the modern city walls. For the Ganquan Palace, Quanjiu village in Hu County, the Palace of Longing for a Son, the Terrace of Gazing in Longing, Luntai and the Jushi theater, Mount Fu, the Jade Gate grain route, and the alternating-field trial plots, this story has not obtained sufficient evidence to confirm specific locations; they remain to be verified. Place names in the edict are not treated as the place it was issued. Links: https://www.xakpw.com/single/21209 https://news.cntv.cn/2013/11/01/ARTI1383293652112620.shtml https://dsr.nii.ac.jp/digital-maps/dsr/place-names/0133.html.ja

5. Fact, rumor, and retelling: the witchcraft accusations are not proof that curses existed; the motives of Jiang Chong and Shi De are attributed as in the histories, not as psychology known to the editor. The explanation of the bound horse comes from a captive's report quoted in the edict; no independent Xiongnu text has been obtained. The figures of tens of thousands and several thousand dead follow the ancient sources. Questions, transitions, and interpretations are contemporary editorial writing; no new dialogue, sensory scenes, or private thoughts have been added. The ancient and Song-period texts are public domain; modern web pages are used only for brief factual summaries, and no protected research is reproduced. The narrative is an original contemporary work.